1100 E. Broad St., Columbus, OH

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Thursday June 6, 2013 6:29 AM

Reynard Birtha, 73, put his oxygen tube aside, lifted a trumpet to his lips and played
How Great Thou Art, complete with jazz riffs.

“I still got some chops, man,” he said. “False teeth and all, you know what I’m saying?”

The oxygen tank hissed softly in the background. He has emphysema.

Birtha was sitting on his bed at Jenkins Terrace, a senior-citizen complex at 1100 E. Broad St.,
and playing out a window so people on a patio below could hear him. Sometimes, they call out
requests.

The horn has been a constant in his life. Until a few years ago, so was trouble.

“I was a bad guy,” Birtha admits. He was incarcerated on drug or robbery charges (“caught a
case,” as he puts it) several times.

In 1971, he happened to be doing time in the old Ohio Penitentiary with a number of other jazz
musicians. As part of a rehabilitation program, they recorded an album, backed by Ohio State
University musicians and recorded in the prison chapel.

It quickly faded from sight, and Birtha, who had conservatory training, says he never made a
dime.

When I first met him in 2007, he was living in a homeless shelter. Drug problems had landed him
there, but he was trying to get clean and find an apartment. At the time, he told me about the
prison jazz ensemble and said a British producer who specializes in obscure jazz recordings was
interested in reissuing the album.

It sounded like a long shot, but it wasn’t.

Producer Gerald Short, late last year, released
Hard Luck Soul, featuring Birtha and his band mates, who called themselves the Ohio
Penitentiary 511 Jazz Ensemble (511 was supposedly a post office box number at the Pen). The
release is on the Jazzman Records label (www.jazz manrecords.co.uk).

“The fact that Birtha’s album was recorded in prison, gained little exposure and sold poorly
does not detract from the fact that the music in it is superb,” Short said in an email.

It has four songs, all of them featuring Birtha on trumpet and Logan Rollins, his late friend,
on saxophone. One reviewer called it a “curious blend of tight funk and spiraling grooves.”

Birtha might not make much money from the recording, but he relishes it as evidence of what he
once could do with a horn.

“It still sounds fresh,” he said. “It didn’t sound this good back then. Maybe my ears have
changed.”

Nowadays, Birtha confines his playing to the bedroom window concerts and, occasionally, church.
(His brother is a minister.) Faith, he said, is how he finally kicked the addictions that got him
in so much trouble.

“If I hadn’t have kicked it, I wouldn’t be here. Yeah, I kicked it — through the Lord.”

He can’t play the long, lightning-fast passages he played in the prison recording. But he’d
still rather pick up the horn than do almost anything else.

“I love it. I love it. When I get my horn, I go somewhere where nobody go but me, the horn and
the Lord. Ain’t nobody go there but us.”